This chapter examines the discourse around gender in the media by analyzing a Japanese beer advertising campaign from the 1970s. Its major objective is to explore how discussions of advertising campaigns, across decades, reveal an underutilized, but rich and diverse trove of understandings about gender. To this end, the first section discusses the advertising discourse, the choice of product, its connection to gendered depictions and the background of this particular campaign. The various interpretations and discussions of the model of masculinity featured in this campaign are then analyzed and placed in historical context before a conclusion which summarizes these findings and highlights the importance of this approach.

Introduction

In 1970, Mifune Toshirō, star of countless jidaigeki and noted collaborator of Kurosawa Akira, sauntered to the bow of a ship, opened a bottle of beer and quaffed it. This performative act of consumption was in service of an advertising campaign for Sapporo Beer under the rubric “Otoko wa damatte…Sapporo Biiru” (Men are silent… Sapporo Beer). Utilizing Mifune’s image garnered from many years of playing loners, rough outcasts, and authoritative men, this campaign presented beer consumption as a masculine, Japanese and solitary activity. Lauded by authors and commentators as a success despite, or because of, its unique singular image of manhood, it gained a reputation both as one of the advertisements of 1970 and of this period. Its overt depiction of hyper-masculinity has continued to resonate, serving as a touchstone for the idea of what Japanese masculinity is, and what it should be. This vision has continued to inform depictions of men in contemporary advertisements and continues to be used as a reference for how men should act in order to be men.

This campaign was not without criticism, however, with contemporaneous commentators negotiating and challenging the meaning and significance of the depiction they saw in their newspapers, homes and in other media. To date, there has been little interrogation or examination of such interpretations and their evolution and importance within Japan’s mediascape in the postwar period. This chapter maps these changes in perspectives on gender and masculinity in Japan by critically analyzing the writings of the critics, creatives and corporate entities that constitute the advertising discourse.